Maryland Police order student to the ground after Omni Alert Firearm Detection system mistook bag of chips for gun

BALTIMORE COUNTY, Md. (WBAL) – An artificial intelligence security detector (Omni Alert) led to a terrifying moment for a Maryland high school student after an empty chip bag stuffed in his pocket set off an alert that dispatched police.

“It was a scary situation. It’s nothing I’ve been through before,” Taki Allen said.

On Monday at around 7 p.m., Allen says he was sitting outside of Kenwood High School in Baltimore County waiting for his ride after football practice.

While waiting with his friends, Allen says he ate a bag of Doritos, crumpled up the bag and put it in his pocket.

What happened next caught him completely off guard.

“Twenty minutes later, it was like eight cop cars that came pulling up to us.” Allen remembered. “At first, I didn’t know where they was going until they started walking towards me with guns, talking about, ‘Get on the ground.’ I was like, ‘What?’ And made get on my knees and then put my hands behind my back and cuffed me, and then they searched me and they figured out I didn’t have nothing. Then they went over there to where I was standing, found a bag of chips on the floor.”

Allen asked why officers approached him.

“They said that an AI detector or something detected that I had a gun. He showed me a picture. I was just holding a Doritos bag like this,” Allen described. “It was two hands in, one hand out and one finger out, and they said it looked like a gun.”

Last year, Baltimore County high schools started using a gun detection system that uses artificial intelligence to help detect potential weapons by tapping into existing school cameras.

The system can identify a possible weapon and then send an alert to the school safety team and law enforcement.

Allen’s grandfather says that he’s not only upset about the situation, but also the response.

“Nobody would want this to happen to their child,” Lamont Davis said. “No one, no one wants this to happen to their child.”

Baltimore County police officials provided a letter from the principal that was sent to parents. It says, in part, “At approximately 7 p.m., school administration received an alert that an individual on school grounds may have been in possession of a weapon. The Department of School Safety and Security quickly reviewed and canceled the initial alert after confirming there was no weapon.”

The company behind the AI gun detection technology is called Omnilert.

Omnilert doesn’t comment on internal school procedures.

The school system says counseling is being offered to the students involved.